the blog

The internet has its share of lies. One of them is viral Facebook sharing memes. Doing some morning reading I reflected on an image I liked and shared the evening before. (image below)

First, give the creator of this praise for tackling a terrible issue in our society: math. How can we tackle big problems when they're on the scale of millions and billions? Boil it down to years, hours, minutes, and seconds. But secondly, is it right? Do we jump on board and push this concept around the world without any credible source?

We have indeed deforested half of the world's mature tropical forests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#cite_note-Rainforest_Facts-7

The image claims we've been here for 4 hours, .0004 years, or 45,000 years back to the original scale. Technically it should be more like 200,000 years so we've actually been around for 0.73 days or 17.5 hours. The industrial revolution started in 1760 or 255 years ago. Indeed a minute and a half. And of course the image is claiming that in that time we've deforested half of the world's forest.

So mostly right? I noticed a comment thread on the original posting crying foul of the math. That person did a great job of saying that the point is still valid -- save our trees -- but we shouldn't allow partially true statistics to flourish. He was blasted by dozens of other users.

The point is, knowing readers are not expected to fact check or do math, how do we allow messages like this to pass through the advocacy world without some sort of verification?

Or, is it as Mark Twain said, "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, unless you can't think of anything better."